Security Overview

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The following security measures are currently supported:

1. Authentication of connections to brokers from clients (producers and consumers), other brokers and tools, using either SSL or SASL. Kafka supports the following SASL mechanisms:

   • SASL/GSSAPI (Kerberos) - starting at version 0.9.0.0
   • SASL/PLAIN - starting at version 0.10.0.0
   • SASL/SCRAM-SHA-256 and SASL/SCRAM-SHA-512 - starting at version 0.10.2.0
   • SASL/OAUTHBEARER - starting at version 2.0

2. Encryption of data transferred between brokers and clients, between brokers, or between brokers and tools using SSL (Note that there is a performance degradation when SSL is enabled, the magnitude of which depends on the CPU type and the JVM implementation.)

3. Authorization of read / write operations by clients

4. Authorization is pluggable and integration with external authorization services is supported

It's worth noting that security is optional - non-secured clusters are supported, as well as a mix of authenticated, unauthenticated, encrypted and non-encrypted clients. The guides below explain how to configure and use the security features in both clients and brokers.